My latest at Forbes:
AI agents are doing more and more work every day. One helps me research the humanoid robot ecosystem; another manages my daily email and weekly calendar. Until now, however, agents had a hard time paying for services, even if I wanted to authorize them to do so. This week, that changed.
San Francisco-based InFlow is launching what it calls agent-native commerce infrastructure, built on top of Visa Intelligent Commerce. The combination is meaningful because it pairs two things the agentic economy has been missing: secure, network-grade payment credentials that an agent can actually use, and a policy engine that decides what an agent is allowed to do with them.
In other words: the AI agent gets a wallet, and the wallet comes with rules.
InFlow positions itself as B2AI infrastructure: business-to-AI. The platform handles identity, onboarding, multi-currency wallet functionality and a policy-governed payments engine. Visa Intelligent Commerce supplies the payment credentials, tokenization, authentication and merchant acceptance through Visa’s global network.
“AI agents are a new buyer category, and businesses need a trusted way to support them,” Visa VP Tanner Riche said. “Visa Intelligent Commerce helps enable secure, trusted credentials for agent-initiated transactions.”
According to Visa’s own Business-to-AI report, 71% of businesses say they’re willing to optimize products, offers, and experiences specifically for AI agents — and 77% are already using or piloting AI in their operations.
The deeper question: how are agents supposed to make decisions about transacting? And whether we trust our AI agents to spend our money.